This invention relates generally to apparatus that guide or redirect a continuous web of material, such as paper, fabric and the like. It relates more particularly to guiding and redirecting sheet type or web material between processing stations, such as a paper web under tension between printers and web winding machines, or other web processing machines such as cutters, slitters, mergers, or folders, for example.
The paper printing industry has undergone substantial changes over the past decade. Faster and more specialized equipment has allowed even moderately sized print shops to satisfy a wide variety of commercial printing needs. However, this equipment is almost always heavy, bulky, and very expensive. Rolls of paper weighing several hundred or even a thousand pounds are used by large commercial operations as a source of paper for their sizeable and numerous print jobs, with processing equipment positioned near or around the paper roll handling machines to minimize necessary movement of machinery. Tumbars have been employed to redirect a continuous paper web toward one machine or another, but have traditionally been mounted on the machines themselves. While alleviating some of the problems in moving and aligning heavy and sensitive equipment for high speed print runs, mounting turnbars on the associated equipment has been time consuming, has not alleviated the need for somewhat precise alignment of these heavy machines, and has not eliminated the need to physically move them from time to time to assemble differing printing process lines or for machinery maintenance.
What is needed in the art is an apparatus to reduce or eliminate the above shortfalls, one that would also allow reconfiguration of printing process lines by adding or omitting certain process machinery from the line without physically moving expensive and heavy equipment. The art has been recently enhanced by co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,860,616, wherein paper from alternate sources may be fed into a printer. The web control matrix disclosed herein is much more flexible and adaptable than the web feeding apparatus of the aforementioned patent, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The web control matrix of the present invention manipulates the path of web material among three axes so that machinery need not be moved to reconfigure a printing operation.
In accordance with the present invention, a matrix frame work is disclosed that provides a plurality of alternative paths for one or more paper webs to move from one web processing device to another web processing device, such as an unwind machine, printer, folder, and the like. The webs move under tension imposed by web tensioning means provided in at least one of the processing devices. The matrix framework comprises at least three uprights arranged in a polygon shape or pattern. Any two of the uprights can support at least one generally horizontally oriented turnbar, whereby the paper web under tension can be redirected by the horizontally oriented turnbar to provide a change in direction of the web.